Three senior sales executives quit Apple India

KOLKATA: Three of Apple India's senior sales executives from the India leadership team have put in their papers, two senior industry executives said.

This includes Rahul Puri who was national sales, distribution head and head of operator business, and Jayant Gupta who used to head iPhone sales, modern trade and the franchisee-owned Apple Premium Retail stores in the country. The third executive is Manish Sharma who was national sales head, telecom.

When contacted, an Apple India spokesperson declined to comment on personnel issues.


The exits comes on the heels of the iPhone maker rejigging its distribution system moving from five national distributors to two distributors as ET reported in June.

Apple India's new country head Michel Coulomb, who took charge in December, will retain only two national distributors -- Ingram Micro and Redington. Three others Brightstar, Rashi Peripherals and HCL Infosystems will be phased out by next year March.

Of the three senior executives who quit, one of them is likely to join an leading US-based e-commerce firm in India. Two others are serving their notice period.

"With these senior level exits, there could be more changes in the Apple India sales team especially in the mid level roles. The company probably wants to cut down multiple management layers since we still do not know the successor for the roles which have become vacant," said an industry executive.

Apple has around 3% share of the total Indian smartphone market while in the premium segment it is competing with Samsung and China's OnePlus.

The new country head is dismantling the ‘open distribution’ strategy at Apple India as part of the distribution rejig which had created a lot of discontent amongst its offline trade partners, since the distributors would often indulge in wholesaling to achieve targets leading to rampant deep discounting online and fluctuation in prices almost every day.

Besides, as part of the new strategy, Apple will also attempt to sell directly to large retailers and online partners. This will be undertaken from the new distribution centre Apple has set up at Bhiwandi near Mumbai.